Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) are essential in maintaining a healthy and habitable living or working environment. Utilities such as gas and electricity are necessary to operate HVAC systems. For many buildings with multiple units utilities are usually paid by the owner and the tenants have no ability to control and pay for their own usage. Moreover, each tenant might have differing preferences of a comfortable room temperature or may have different needs and habits in the use of utilities. For example, a particular tenant may be away from home for an extended period of time and would prefer to turn off the heating and air conditioning while away.
One common method of allocating and monitoring utilities in multi-unit buildings is by installing individual sub-meters that measure run-time in zone valves. This way, each unit is billed based on its sub-meter reading. This method, however, is costly because of equipment, installation and maintenance costs. This method is also problematic because the meters are capable of being tampered with. Also, this method does not give building owners the option of controlling the temperature and only provides usage readings.
Another common method of allocating and monitoring utilities, in particular heating, in multi-unit buildings is to install separate heating units (e.g., furnace or boiler) in each unit and separate meters for the same. Again, this method is very costly in terms of equipment, installation and maintenance.
Yet another common method of allocating and monitoring utilities in multi-unit buildings is by metering the overall consumption of the building and allocating costs based on square footage of each particular unit. With this method, however, tenants with lower usage could be required to pay more than the utilities actually used and tenants with higher usage could pay less than actual usage. Also, in many cases, because payment is allocated, tenants are not as mindful of the usage of utilities which results in much waste. For example, tenants might have the air conditioner or heat on even when the unit is unoccupied.
In certain instances, especially in older buildings, heat is provided by circulating hot water or steam to radiators or baseboards within each unit throughout the building. Each tenant cannot control the temperature of the unit and therefore a particular unit may be too cold because of lack of heat especially if the unit is far away from the central boiler, or too hot because excessive heat is provided in which case the tenant might open windows to cool the unit. In turn, much heat is wasted.
As seen above, current methods and systems for providing HVAC and allocating utilities to multiple units in apartment buildings and the like are problematic.